I have struggled with the hell doctrine since the age of seventeen. When Francis Xavier preached Christianity in Japan, some converts reportedly wept through the night after learning that family members who had died outside the faith were condemned to eternal hell. I understood something of that anguish when I encountered Christianity in 1979. My new Christian friends told me that my Jewish relatives were in hell. In the next breath, they assured me that Jesus loved me. I had trouble reconciling the two propositions. I wasn’t feeling the love.
Around 1981, after reading Erich Fromm’s critique of fundamentalist religion, I experienced an enormous release. I felt liberated from what Alfred North Whitehead, in Religion in the Making, describes as the image of an evil God. The relief was so powerful that it felt almost religious itself, as if an immense weight had been lifted from my chest. Over the years, I came to call that experience Fromm Night, a shorthand for an emotional and spiritual liberation too complicated to summarize every time I referred to it.
This is where my attempts to return to Christianity become painful. Conversion can seem to require me to repudiate Fromm Night—the very experience that once restored my psychological and moral health. To accept orthodox Christianity, I seem required to return to the anguish of those Japanese converts and call that anguish truth. My Jewish relatives are lost. Their suffering is eternal. My horror at this doctrine is something I must overcome. That, presumably, is my cross to bear.
And this is the love of Jesus. This is the light. This is the true path. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through him.
But I keep encountering a problem that I cannot bully myself into resolving. Suppose I force myself to bow before Jesus. Is submission the same thing as love? If some part of me remains horrified by what I am required to believe, can I truthfully say that I love Jesus with all my heart, mind, and soul? If accepting Christ requires me to suppress Fromm Night, what exactly have I accepted—Jesus, or my fear of being wrong about Jesus?
These questions lead me toward still more disturbing ones. Is Jesus cruel? Is orthodox Christianity cruel? Or have I misunderstood Christianity so profoundly that I have mistaken a human theology of exclusion for the person of Jesus himself?
Yet the easy escape doesn’t satisfy me either. I don’t want to manufacture a domesticated Christianity stripped of every difficult doctrine until Jesus becomes little more than a dispenser of therapeutic reassurance. If Christianity is true, I want to confront what it actually claims, not dilute it into spiritual pablum because the harder version frightens me.
So I remain caught between two powerful experiences. One tells me that escaping a theology of eternal punishment was among the great liberations of my life. The other tells me not to dismiss Jesus merely because Christianity makes demands upon me that I find unbearable.
I am still trying to understand spiritual reality. I have not given up. There are profound aspects of Jesus that continue to draw me. Part of me longs to relinquish the selfish ego, turn outward, serve others, forgive, sacrifice, and discover whether that really is the path toward a fuller life.
But the contradiction remains. I cannot make myself forget Fromm Night, nor can I make myself stop looking toward Jesus.
That ambivalence is not an intellectual puzzle I occasionally entertain. It has been one of the enduring torments of my spiritual life.
Cinemorphosis 
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